Myths & Legends - Kerem Gogus

This design is a business project Kerem Gogus did for David Arkenstone's music CD "Myths & Legends". The whole project took 5 months to complete.

About the Artist

Kerem Gogus is a 30 year old 3D enthusiast living in Istanbul (Turkey).
He is a self trained designer working in 3D Modeling, Digital Painting and in Graphic Design.
His aim with 3D Digital Imaging is to create the worlds and places he has in his mind since his childhood.

"I have been interested in graphics ever since I was a kid.
My interest in 3D started in high school.
I had an Amiga 500, but with its 1024kb of ram it was very hard for me to get into 3D.
I could only run some simple terrain generators, and code demos and intros for some computer groups."

After these first years he took a long break from computers.
He started again at the end of 2002 after he saw the artworks of Ryan Bliss, Jerry Composano and Deanna Hancock.
At first he tried 3D Studio Max, switched to Bryce, and then to Vue 4.

"I have chosen Vue because of its overall ease of use and user friendly interface.
It is different than other terrain generators, because it has everything a 3D program needs."

"Creating objects, light and managing them is very easy with Vue.
I always found Vue very direct and logical.
The interface, render engine, plant, terrain and atmosphere editors were the main reasons for me to switch to Vue."

His inspiration comes from music. He always listens to music when working on a 3D scene.
Movies are also a great source for his inspiration as well as artworks of other artists.

The Project Myths & Legends

First Steps

"By the time David Arkenstone contacted me for creating an image for his video El Dorado, I was actually working on some personal images I had created with the inspiration of his music.
The first thing I did was send him those previews."

"I scratched out the things that came to my mind and as you can see it was very crappy drawing, but it worked fine to help clear things up in my mind."

Kerem started to work on the 3D environment for El Dorado. David Arkenstone also wanted a Palace for the Song Of Sheherazade, a temple, statues and a female character for the Temple Of Isis, as well as underwater ruins for Oceanus. Besides working on the digital environment for El Dorado, Kerem started model the 3D objects he would need for the scenes.

Creation

After cleaning up everything Kerem started to model the necessary elements.

"It was a challenging task for me, but I enjoyed it a lot.
I learned a ton of new things and also used my imagination to make conceptual models which is an area I was dying to work on."

Kerem used Cinema 4D for the modeling works.
He was fairly new to 3D modeling - Cinema 4D was a great option to achieve the results he wanted swiftly.
The use quite a lot of of Booleans and Hypernurbs made the objects pretty heavy.
He was importing his models to Vue for texturing and placing them in a well designed environment, and those high poly objects really slowed down the system.
After he finished the texturing in Vue, he used the Weld option in Vue to reduce the polygon count.

On all 3D illustrations for El Dorado, he used similar techniques.
When he finished the modeling of the necessary objects, he imported them to Vue and created the natural environment around them.
"Nature always amazes me so it is always wonderful to work on it.
Because never-being-happy about the raw render results I always apply some color corrections to the images to make them look more dream-like."

Kerem created 4 videos on David Arkenstone's Myths & Legends DVD.
For the El Dorado video, he created over 30 3D digial illustrations/ paintings using Vue.
He separated his images into layers for easier animation and compositing.
He put his imagination together with David's music to create a concept for the video.

"Also I had a chance to work with Hollywood visual fx specialist Johnny Wilson on this project.
He gave life to my images by animating them. "
As Johnny Wilson (our directory and animator) said - the most pleasing part of the entire project was that it started with nothing but ideas, and it was great to see some of those ideas shaped in 3D.

Current Projects

Kerem Gogus is currently working on his own demo reel project, as well as on an album cover.
He is creating illustrations and designs for Karin Leitner, a classical musician from Austria.